New e-health strategy planned for Scotland

A new e-health strategy for Scotland in spring 2008 is promised in a national healthcare action plan, Better Health, Better Care, published this week.

The action plan says Scotland’s incremental approach to deploying technology will continue and the new strategy will build on this. “We do not plan to produce some large single database of patient information but will join up systems where there are clear benefits from doing so.”

Key features of the new strategy will be:

• action around the three themes of supporting safe, effective, timely and efficient patient care, contributing to equitable, patient centred care and improving e-health capacity;
• a vision of ever diminishing paper and increasing use by clinicians of secure IT to access the right information in the right place at the right time;
• a clear focus on patient safety, safeguarding confidentiality, evidence based care and more efficient management of the patient’s journey through care;
• a new emphasis on ‘Patient e-health’, initially focused on long term conditions, with trials of patient/carer online access to their records along with knowledge to promote self and collaborative care.

Significant progress has been made in e-health, according to the action plan which was drawn up by the Scottish Government. “The Emergency Care Summary now contains key clinical information for over 5.1 million patients and is currently used around 25,000 times per week, if the patient explicitly consents, by clinicians in out-of-hours GP services, A&E departments and NHS24."

The plan continues: “Use of the Community Health Index (CHI) number on the 10 key clinical documents for communication between GPs and acute hospitals has increased from 70% in November 2006 to 94% in December 2007 and it now used on 94% of community-held case records, up from 86% in April 2007.”

A pledge to continue support for the Scottish Centre for Telehealth is also included in the action plan. The centre will focus on telehealth applications in the areas of long term conditions, paediatrics, unscheduled care and remote and rural health care. The aim will be to make Scotland “a global leader in telehealth.”

An example of telehealth working between Shetland and Aberdeen is profiled in the action plan. The service is giving Shetland islanders with head and neck tumours access to specialists in Aberdeen. Two local doctors and two local nurses have been trained to facilitate the clinical service that now runs every month.

Future phases will involve the delivery of a remote diagnostic service from Inverness to Stornoway and a remote review appointment service to a local community hospital for patients who have had surgery, radio or chemotherapy for head and neck tumours.

Link

Better Health, Better Care

Linda Davidson